Social Network Analysis in Cattle Breeding

Cattle raising is one of the most important agricultural activities in Colombia, it occurs in almost every region of the national territory with Antioquia, Casanare and Córdoba leading the ranking.

Cattle raising in Colombia is mostly rural and done by individuals. Currently it contributes to 3.6% of the national GDP and among Latin American countries, Colombia ranks fifth in cattle raising.

In 2014 the national distribution of cattle was the following:

Female	12’516,695
Male	6’155,541
Calves	3’921,046
Total	22’593,282

Due to the benefits of weather conditions in Colombia, cattle are bred for dairy, beef and a dual purpose, which is not possible in every country.

According to Fedegán, (the Colombian federation for cattle breeders) there are 23 types of cattle in the country, however here I will explain the most emblematic types.

                                                                               

                                            

-Brahman: Famous for producing meat.

-Gyr: Produces between 30 and 35 liters of milk daily.

-Holstein: Produces between 20 and 22 liters of milk per day and has become more important because of its milk quality.

-Jersey: Produces between 15 and 20 liters of milk daily.

-Normando: Dual purpose breed.

Basically there are two ways of buying or selling cattle in Colombia, through a livestock auction or direct agreement. A great disadvantage of livestock auctions is that they are located in big cities or towns, what makes it a difficult option for peasants to travel long distances with their animals without being sure they are going to sell them at a good price. Also, it is widely known that before the auction starts the best animals have already been sold backstage and some animals are overpriced.

Regarding a more personal selling, it mostly depends of every individual personal network, what makes it hard to know breeders from other regions.

These reasons are what led me to believe that if we had endless resources and unlimited access to information and time, a Social Network Analysis could make a huge improvement in the relationships of breeders in Colombia and mostly in the cattle selling process.

Additionally, it could help share important information about vaccines, pastures, new artificial insemination techniques, milk production levels, birth rates, among other things.

For the purpose of this analysis, I have created a network with the most relevant regions in Colombia where cattle breeders are clustered and some individual farmers are connected to them due to geographic location.

For example, let’s say farmer “d” breeds Holstein cattle, he is only connected to another farmer which is “a” and the auction of “Casanare”, however in Casanare they mostly sell Brahman and Gyr so his cattle is not as valued in that region and he is forced to sell it underpriced.

But if there was the possibility of understanding the cattle network of the country with all the specific details of what animals do they breed and under what conditions; farmer “d” could easily understand the way to contact someone in particular in the region of “Cundinamarca” who specializes in Holstein.

This network can also be valuable to spot in which region there is going to be an abundance of sacrifices to sell meat where maybe in other regions there is a shortage and it would help fighting the price hike.

Further more, this analysis can be applied for Latin America or to be more ambitious the rest of the world, in 2013 Brazil exported 668,000 heads of cattle and Colombia exported 300,000. Creating this type of network would allow breeders to find the connections in those countries we already know are demanding cattle produce such as South Korea, Japan and China.

If we were able to build this network, there would be amazing opportunities and possibilities for cattle breeders.


Cristina Osorio

Effective Program and Knowledge management in a release

The stage: In IT services, projects are usually operationalized. Consider a bank that offers retail banking services like savings and transactions account, mortgages, personal loans, debit cards and credit cards. Usually, such banks’ IT department will be engaged in projects associated with performance/process improvement, development of small to medium sized features, adding security features to banks’ offerings and production support. As there is very little to no impact of technological advancements to these projects, they are managed in the form of releases of various durations. The teams involved in these releases tend to remain same. In such projects, complexity lies in:

1.       The number of teams involved and

2.       Different demographic locations of these teams

For example, refer to a release that has three different teams: Development teams in India, Infrastructure team from Hong Kong and business and management teams from Florida.

The difficulty arises while orchestrating the release when these teams have to interact with each other on a regular basis. The teams have to understand and follow a single plan to deliver the features for any release with constraints like time and budget. Moreover, there are many development teams in India: 5 teams working on the back-end system, 2 teams working on front-end system and 2 testing teams. Likewise, in Florida, there are 2 teams of business analysts and a management team.

Each function has a project manager: 1 PM for back-end, 1 PM for front-end, 1 PM for testing etc. To manage the release, there is a program manager, who acts as a release manager. He or she prepares the plan by taking inputs from various key stakeholders including the project managers, architects and subject matter experts.

The problem: To evaluate the progress of the release, the program manager conducts a periodic (usually weekly) meeting with all the PMs to get a good visibility of the progress in each team. This helps the program manager to understand the overall progress of the release. If any of the PMs are not present in the meeting due to some reason, he or she assigns a backup person to provide the update. Usually, this person has worked in only a subset of the development and may not have the overall view of the project. In such cases, it becomes necessary to identify the key people from each team that can provide help during system testing and user testing phase when their PM is absent.

To address this issue, we can conduct an SCA on the teams involved and identify the important resources from each team that can act as backup for their respective PMs and are most knowledgeable resources for all complex features.

How:

Create a smart survey for all the team to participate and identify the following:

1.       The person who acts as a focal for other team members in identifying the right person from his or her team to solve other their queries.

2.       The person who is the most knowledgeable member for a feature.

For example, the testing team talks to person “P1” from team A to identify the right person to address their queries.

Here, P1 and P2 acts as shadow PMs for team A. P1 routes all the queries from testers to the right person in team A. Likewise, P2 routes all the queries from front-end team to the right person in team A. Both of them can act as backup to their PM in the weekly meeting with the program manager.

Using SCA, we can also identify the most knowledgeable person for each complex feature in the release. For example, P1 from team A is identified as the most knowledgeable person for a complex feature F1.

Such focal points will be involved in fixing the defects and preparing knowledge artifacts for the complex features that they are good at. Remember that for a complex feature we may get one person from more than one team. This is because, a particular feature was developed by back-end and front-end teams. So, the changes associated with that feature will be known by more than one person.

Implementing this process based on the outcome of SCA can help the release run more effectively and reduce the unwanted communication needed to fix a defect during the testing phase.

Use SNA to measure the role of support service functions within a professional services firm

I worked for many years for large City international law firms which were structured as traditional partnerships. These firms focused all their HR activities and training on lawyers who were seen as the ‘engine room’ and key to the success of the business. Fee-earning lawyers have a very transparent career path and are very well respected and remunerated for their efforts. However there is not such a transparent career path or level of respect for the non legal functions. For the sake of clarity I will refer in this blog to the non legal functions as ‘support services’. These functions cover Business Development (BD), Marketing, Communications, Knowledge Management, Information Services, Compliance, Training, Technology and Facilities Management.

In the law firms where I worked the support services departments had a much flatter structure and much less generous terms of remuneration notwithstanding their increasing importance. Where excellent legal services are a given (due to the high level of fees) it is in my view through excellent support services that law firms can differentiate themselves, maintain their ‘culture and feel’, and thereby attract the best talent.

Why SNA?
As ROI is much easier to quantify for lawyers with hours recorded and billable hourly target figures I believe that SNA would be a very helpful tool within the context of a law firm to identify the role of support services in the network of the partnership. In my experience many senior partners underestimate the role of the support services departments in ensuring the smooth and successful operation of their firm. A clearer understanding could ensure that law firms invest properly in their support services departments, and identify where the greatest investment is needed. Appropriate remuneration and recognition would enable law firms to retain the best people by appropriately compensating them for the contribution that they provide to the success of the business. If support services employees were better connected this could reduce churn (people staying 3 to 4 years and then moving on) which is both costly and time consuming. Moreover it could diminish the ‘them and us’ distinction that exists between lawyers and supports services and foster a more collaborative culture. Law firms are ‘people businesses’ and competitive advantage is achieved by (1) having the best people at all levels and in all departments; (2) knowledge accumulation and sharing; and (3) good communication throughout the firm.

What would be the benefits of SNA?
SNA could be used to ascertain:

-       -the support services departments that are best connected – and which practice areas they have the highest connections with – and why?

-        trainees and qualified lawyers that most utilize the support services departments. Lawyers could be grouped by level of experience.

-       those people within support services departments who have the highest connectivity, the highest in-betweeness, closeness and who are sources and sinks, and possible bottlenecks.  Then do an egonet of these people and properly ascertain where knowledge is stored.

-       the level of inbound and outbound connectivity for support services groups. The inbound score may be very low at junior levels with isolates.

-       connectivity between support services groups.  To ensure the smooth running of the firm it is important that those within support services groups share knowledge and are well connected at all levels. In my experience there may be sub-groups of connectivity at the highest levels, or even cliques amongst department heads, but few relationships at the lower level.

Attributes to be included
To try and understand the connectivity the following attributes should be added:

-       nationality

-       years of work experience

-       years with the firm

-       name of support department

-       location of office

-       age (within groups)

-       gender.

How is data gathered?

It should not be too difficult to conduct an SNA analysis within a law firm context. Many firms have Client Relationship Management Systems such as Interaction and department intranet sites that could be used to gather data. This could also be supplemented with an online survey every 3 to 6 months as part of the appraisal process, which could also cover social networks to see who connects outside work. I believe that in the main support services departments would be very supportive of the process if they appreciated the logic behind it as would the partnership provided Data Protection Act concerns could be satisfied regarding retrieval and storage of relevant data.

Recommendations

With this knowledge gained from SNA within support services departments:

-       training could be directed to where it is most needed – communication skills for isolates and management for emerging leaders

-       bottle necks could be removed

-       better remuneration and career development for ‘emerging leaders’

-       succession planning could be properly introduced to ensure a smooth transfer of knowledge

-       rotations could be introduced into practice areas from central functions

-       social events could be organized to encourage connectivity  

-       support services groups could be included in events to celebrate the completion of a deal if it is clear that they have made a significant contribution. Why not include the teams that were instrumental in winning the pitch? Or the knowledge management team that operated the online data room?

-       reward those that are eigenvectors or have improved their connectivity with bonus or extra holiday to motivate and incentivize.

Susan – 29/05/15

Social Network Analysis and Coworking spaces

I used to work in a coworking space in Australia called The York Butter Factory (or YBF). There, more than 50 startups and 300 employees were at the same place and working hard, but communications and collaborations were not efficient at all.

This is how the coworking space looks, and it's on two floors:

During my whole year there, I noticed that most of the people were staying only together within the same firm and desk, and they were not communicating at all - except rarely during some events.

The thing is, the turn over was very high: new startups were getting in and others were leaving every month, and sometimes we didn't even notice it - and I think this is a problem, because you are missing valuable opportunities.
You couldn't know who was who, and more especially: who gets skills and characteristics that you might need in the future. 

This is where the SNA could help and I will now explain how. In every startup' lives, you always need at some point someone with skills in programming, selling, speaking another language, or with maybe experience into raising funds, doing an IPO, or settling down into a new country for instance. (I am not saying someone that you could hire: just someone that could help you easily and probably for free as you are both from the same field).

I can't count how many times I have seen on the YBF Facebook group employees or CEO publishing posts, looking for someone - probably sitting just next to them and having the skills they were looking for. Most of the time, these posts were not working, simply because people always had something else to do rather than reading or answering them (I also have to admit that collaboration and mutual-help is not strong in the Australian culture where individualism is astoundingly high).

That is to say: SNA could now bring a tool allowing people to directly find someone next to them in the same coworking space with all the criteria required, so that you could directly find him, talk to him, and avoid the "Facebook experience".

Through an online survey when you get accepted into the YBF (or any other coworking space), qualitative and quantitative questions could be asked to this new employee, in several areas such as:

- Detailing your work-skills
- Sharing your past-experiences
- Giving your age & nationality
- Describing all the languages.

To get this: you need someone from India, knowing the culture, speaking the language, and with 5 years of experience at programming?
He or she is maybe at the second floor of your coworking space, and you didn't know it.

Ucinet and SNAs could display a map of everything you need:

As seen during our classes, the SNA method, through dichotomized data, could show the future collaborators you might need as I just explained. With a right click on the person and access to the attributes, you can find all the details you are looking for.

Indegrees and outdegrees from the nodes could be also used to go further.

Of course, there are other ways of finding these employees. The Facebook way showed some results, and if you are not too shy you can always talk around you and explain what you need. But this new way could change everything from the time saved to the 100% accurate results you are looking for and you could obtain. 

Collaboration and partnerships could be totally improve thanks to it, and I think it is an important part of our current world that a lot of developed countries can miss sometimes. 

Startups (to quote only one specified example) could grow quicker, save time, and get efficient results: everything they need to grow safely, hire new employees, and help the economy.

Finally, this idea could go even further by joining the datas from several other coworking spaces - from the same city, the same region, etc. I remember employees going from one to another one just to discover new ideas and new people, and I am really optimist on how this SNA ideas could radically improve their experience.

Thanks,

Arnaud Baczkowski.

City Planning

      It’s been estimated that more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities nowadays. It is also been observed that, in the next twenty years, another 2 billion people are expected to move to urban areas which are already overcrowded. The pressures of rapid urbanization make the careful urban planning more difficult. What’s more, for example in China, with the development of the urban area, more and more cities plan to build more advanced public traffic system. Thus, to help urban designers and urban planners to make better decisions of building greater urban area and design better route for public traffic lines, it is a nice option to use UCINET and NETDRAW software to do the urban planning.

     For instance, a better subway system is the one that effectively connects different places people go frequently. It should help residents and travelers get wherever they want in a most effective way. To use the software, we can firstly design a survey providing a list of places (tourist attractions, residential district, commercial area, etc.) to all kinds of people (residents and also travelers) in the city, say QINGDAO (a northern city in China, who is building subway lines in recent and upcoming years). Ask each person who takes the survey to use a five-point scale to evaluate the rate of the frequency they go to those places.

        1 = Never

        2 = Seldom  

        3 = Generally

        4 = Often

        5 = Always

       The purpose of the survey is to determine the most effective and convenient route of the subway lines. The number associated with each places are recorded in the UCINET software. We can dichotomize the data to narrow the span of places who received rating of 4 and 5. In other words, places that people go and visit most frequently. In such survey, we can also ask the survey takers to characterize the attributes (what kinds of the area, what services around such place) of the places where they barely or always go. Besides, we need to characterize the survey takers (their genders, professions, even hobbies, etc.). We name those places that people always visit as the “star places”.

        After receiving the data from the survey, we can also do the social network analysis by addressing the following questions:

·         To identify those “star places”?

·         To identify the places that are not well connected to the others.

·         What is the density of different places, and how can it be enhanced?

·         Identify those places which are not “star places” but are well connected between different “star places”

·         What are the key attributes of the place that people most frequently go to, it is because they live or work there or they like doing shopping there?

·         To identify what’s the emerging “star places”.

·         To classify different “star places” into different subgroups.

By using the results of the survey, we will be able to know centrality measures of which place has the highest eigenvector and in-degree number, also the smallest closeness number. These numbers will provide results of which places are the most popular.

After getting these results, we can build up the subway lines according to the results. Following thoughts should be taken into account.

l  The subway lines should cover all the “star places”.

l  The density and the shape of the subway lines in the system.

l  Each line should conclude almost all kinds of services.

l  The intersection point of different lines should be at the “star places”.

l  Each line should be well-balanced which means it needs to conclude the bustling city lots and the lots that are not bustling enough, in order to make all areas develop at a same pace.

In a word, using the social network analysis, it will be easier to do the city planning because such method provides a way to identify the “star places” (for example, the nodes with higher degree) and also a way to well connect these nodes (by analyzing the betweenness, closeness, and also the connection of subgroups).

                

                                                                             -by Longfei CHENG, 2014 HULT MIB

Blog Assignment: leverage social networks in the B2B secondary market.

Introduction

The Hult Impact Challenge (HIC) is an eight-month, hands-on project during which every team needs to provide an impactful solution to a problem faced by a company. In our team, we worked on the circular economy concept for Philips. The goal was to eliminate wastes in B2B by encouraging harvesting and refurbishing initiatives. To tackle this challenge, some of the competitor teams worked on creating reverse supply chains for the harvested components. Others, thought about creating new warehouses to store this old components. For both cases, costs are high and the projects might not be financially sustainable. The solution we came up with in our team does not require any infrastructure. It consists of creating a network between all the electrical subcontractors in New England through an IT platform. In the first part of this article, I will explain more in details the concept behind our solution, and in the second part, I will focus on the major takeaways from social network analysis that we can use in order to improve our unique value proposition.

Part I

There are two types of operations done by the electrical subcontractors: 

• Installment of new components.
• Dismantlement of old deployed components. 

After being dismantled, the old components are thrown away and in 80% of the cases these equipment are still working and still have a long life expectancy. Our idea is to connect companies through an Add-on that we plug into Philips website. This way, the potential buyer of new components will be proposed to buy old components (as it is done today on Amazon).

Of course to spot this kind of opportunities, there is a whole process of profile matching which should be done, according to the geo-localization of both companies, the period during which the selling company are willing to keep this old components in its inventory, the remaining life expectancy of these components, etc...This Add-on will also allow the companies to rate each other, follow one another and to re-post the selling announcement done by other companies (same principle than re-tweeting)

Part II

For sure we will not save all these old components from being wasted: we only target to save 1% in the first year. However, the first year will be very useful to identify the key players with whom we will work during the second year. First of all, the partners: this means the companies who participate the most in this program, who buy old components and who succeed to sell the ones that they dismantle. This companies are likely to create also matching opportunities between other companies within their network. For them, Philips will be very willing to provide incentives (e.g. carbon footprint certifications, discounts on the new components) to encourage them to keep participating in this program. To identify this partners we will use the Centrality Measures and we will look for the high-level leaders in the network, those who have the highest Eigenvector and betweenness (i.e. the most influential players).
However, before that, we need to define the connections. We can say that we have a connection each time that we have a transaction between two companies (One company is buying from the other) or we can create more complex type of connections which takes into account a weighted combination of the following facts: whether there is a transaction; whether one is a follower of the other; whether they are close to each other geographically.

Finally, the most important part is how to identify the missing connections. With the market research that we did, we came to realize that companies from Massachusetts generally know each other, and even know on which project the competitors/counterparts are working on, but they do not know what happens in the neighboring states.  Here, a real optimization process needs to be done: what are the two companies from different states that, by connecting them, we will increase considerably the density of the whole network?  
Valdis Krebs is making a very good point is his article by saying that “the optimal connection in network efficiency […] may not be a practical connection” because when it is about spreading awareness of the different refurbishing opportunities in the network, it is better to create a new big player than to add a new connection to an existing big player. That’s why I would go for the one who has at the same time high Eigenvector and low Degree (i.e. the one who is connected to many influential players, but who does not have a lot of connections himself). Now creating this missing connection should not be very difficult as we can always use the recipe given by Cross and Parker in their book: invite both companies to one event (e.g. conference in Philips headquarters) or invite those responsible to a fancy show (Opera, Theatre) in which we can decide in advance about the seating arrangement, etc… 
Of course the higher we succeed to improve the density in the network over the years, the more opportunities of harvesting and refurbishing we will spot. What we are trying to achieve, compared to the other teams, is what the sociologist Ronald Burt describe as the creation of a competitive advantage by leveraging the network effect and creating the ties that connect the parts inside of the network.

Conclusion

For the sake of simplicity, I deliberately chose to omit all the constraints related to the challenge as well as a lot of details related to our ongoing project. But the idea is this one: How to use social networks to get rid of the need of infrastructure and replacing it by a distributed system in which we take advantage of the storage capabilities of all the participants in this program. Then how to use social network analysis to identify the key stakeholders and manage at the same time the global awareness of the whole network. Finally, how to identify the missing connections that we need to add, which can improve drastically the performance (hence the profit) of the network. These are some key questions, among many others, that we need to address as accurately as possible if we want to win the competition and meet Philips investors next August in Davos.

Using SNA to evaluate Information and communication Technology requirement of the a family business.

Background:

I am a part of a family owned business. The company is into manufacturing of corrugated boxes. The family is led by 4 brothers, having 6 manufacturing units in close proximity.

The current organization structure is such that 1st brother is the face of the organization meaning he works as connector between the large B2B client and communicate everything within the internal organization.
                       The 2nd brother is responsible for all the financial activity and also looks after 1 of the 6 manufacturing units. The 3rd brother is responsible for Purchase, Maintenance, operations at large, and also looks after 1 of the 6 units. The 4th brother is responsible for Logistics, storage of some inventory and also holds managerial function of 1 of the 6 units.

Situation:

We understand that every business in today's world needs to be integrated and connected in such a way that all the internal and external communication flow becomes seamless.
The current situation is that all the brothers are spending a lot of time in communicating with each other to keep everyone posted however due to communication gaps, few of the information gets missed at times which results in a problem and the business fails to deliver. The level of information flow has made the brothers sick as they are always on the phone and loosing on the personal time.

Problems Identified:

Speed of information flow across different parts of the organization, with respect to keeping everyone updated about the progress without requiring them to be constantly on the phone asking about the update.

Possible Solution:

 The company is looking to invest in an ICT system which might resolve this issue, however to evaluate the requirement MMAK had to analyze, its requirement because the cost of the system totally depends on the number of users and with every user it comes with a cost of the software, hardware and training.  

Objective of SNA:

In order for the this new ICT system to work, the company might consider SNA, this would allow the company to streamline the requirement of information flow. The data which could be used is the corporate cell-phone record that is already available with the company.

The incoming and outgoing calls with the frequency of calls to different numbers can be requested by the telecom company and does not violate the privacy of anyone in the organization. Meaning the company can use everyones interaction with the frequency of the call and then convert them into data that makes sense of UNICET. (For example: if there is more than 5 calls to a number, it would be classified as frequent and less then 1 call a day to a number could be used as "sometimes" likewise depending on the overall data, the measures could be established.)

Now, when we have the data, we can Dichotomize the data into two groups, the first group would have </= to 4&5 which is frequent and most frequent, therefore establishing that there is a 100% requirement of this ICT to these people because the information frequency is very high.

And the other group which is > 4, could be further used to establish the importance of the person, (for Example: the client may not be communicating as much as the internal organization however it is a good idea that he being the source "High out-degree & Low In-degree" of the information. If we ingrate him then the whole process becomes more faster.)

Possible Result:

The SNA has helped to identify the possible solution to a key business problem. With that I am able to establish that the SNA is been a key tool to identify the ICT requirement of the business.


Regards,
Shail Aggarwal
MIM
Hult IBS

How Social Network Analysis can be useful to understand world politics: Take a look to 9 attempts to explain the crazy complexity of the Middle East

Just two examples are below

To see all, check this out : 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/01/9-attempts-to-explain-the-crazy-complexity-of-the-middle-east/

1- Perhaps the most audacious attempt yet is this graphic from British designer David McCandless. The interactive nature of this one is particularly interesting: When you click on an actor, the graphic shifts to show you that actor's specific relationships:

2- That letter seems to have sparked a trend. Within days, Egyptian blogger The Big Pharaoh made a graphical guide for "complete idiots"